In dance, “voice” can refer to the way a body moves, not just the words that come from it. It has taken Anthony Huxley, shy by nature, time to find both. For years, he rarely spoke. He could hide behind his impeccable technique. It’s almost as if a classical step, beautifully executed, became a kind of armor used to shield himself from the world.

“I was so scared I couldn’t really focus,” said Mr. Huxley, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet. “Then I saw an Instagram post by David Hallberg, and it was a quote about how it was more harmful not to bloom. I was like, that’s me. I’m not letting myself bloom. I was like, I just have to do it. Even if it scares me.”

There’s still, he acknowledged, work to do in opening up his dancing and, by extension, himself. But Mr. Huxley, 28, has beat the odds to become one of the company’s most enticing members. He’s the anti-jock. A dancer of superlative refinement with the air of a silent-movie star, caught somehow between the world of the speaking and the world of dreams. In ballet, where dancers fight to show their best angle, Mr. Huxley is prized for his line and poetic sensibility.

“The first thing I noticed about Anthony was that his dancing was unbelievably pure, and you don’t see that very often,” Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief, said in an email interview.

Still, he cast him in George Balanchine’s “Prodigal Son” this season, which goes against type. To dance the title role, Mr. Huxley needs to show more than his innate coordination and crisp footwork.

“I don’t see myself as an angry rebel macho-muscle guy, which is what I think people expect the role to be,” Mr. Huxley said between rehearsals at the David H. Koch Theater. “The first variation is the one that really eludes me — with the anger and excitement. But at the end, when I’m by myself, I get that. I’m more introverted.”

At a recent rehearsal for “Prodigal,” he raised an arm, framing it around his face like a violin bow, and staggered forward on his knees. At this point in the ballet, his character — having been seduced by a cunning Siren and robbed of every last cent — has hit rock bottom. But his arm lacked anguish.

Richard Tanner, a guest ballet master with the company, clapped his hands to stop the music. “Can you see how it’s pretty?” he said. “You’re, like, stroking the side of your face.”

Mr. Huxley paused before admitting, “But I don’t know how to make it not pretty.”

After his recent debut opposite Miriam Miller as the Siren — it was also her first time — Mr. Huxley said the performance was a blur, but he was happy with what he could remember. “It was a whole new experience that I had never been inside of before.”

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Anthony Huxley performing in “Prodigal Son” last month.CreditAndrea Mohin/The New York Times

There was one mishap: Ms. Miller, balancing on his shins, slipped and fell forward. “That’s the only part I remember just hating,” he said. “It was one of those things that had been going perfectly in all the rehearsals, and then a few days before it started getting funny, so we were trying to figure it out.”

But in that final scene, he said, “I was a little bit more in my element because I could just be by myself.”

While he’s more comfortable talking now, Mr. Huxley still has a quiet demeanor when not performing. “He has such a beautiful voice on the stage with his movement quality,” said Indiana Woodward, who performed opposite him as the Sylph in “La Sylphide.” “He expresses everything with so many colors. It’s all flooding out — like the only way he can expresses himself is through all of his limbs.”

All the same, he has no self-importance: “I don’t get the feeling that he thinks he’s incredible,” she said. “I’ve never heard him say, ‘Oh yeah, that was really good.’ It’s just crazy to me, because he’s so fantastic. I hope one day he realizes how amazing he is.”

Revealing himself onstage — “to be present,” as he put it — is one of Mr. Huxley’s missions. Another, which drove him as a student, was to look pristine, yet also daring. Though he’s such a natural dancer, Mr. Huxley, born in Walnut Creek, Calif., said had no idea why his parents enrolled him in classes. “Do you remember on PBS there were those ballroom competition shows?” he asked. Mr. Huxley loved them. “I feel like maybe my parents noticed that.”

His early training was in ballet and jazz dance, but he hated tap: “It was too noisy.” Attaining technical perfection started early. Mr. Huxley is slender and stands 5 feet 8 inches, a stature that could have placed him in the land of jesters — roles traditionally given to shorter male dancers — not princes. When he was a student at the San Francisco Ballet School, Gloria Govrin, a former New York City Ballet soloist, was in charge. Mr. Huxley said he distinctly remembered his teacher-student evaluations with Ms. Govrin. “She was there saying: ‘You’re short. I don’t know if you’re going to grow, if you’re not going to grow. We see you have talent, but we don’t know where it’s going to go from here.’”

After a stint at the company-affiliated School of American Ballet, he joined City Ballet in 2007 and became a soloist in 2011. Around that time, he sustained a back injury that kept him from the stage for months. It was then that he understood he had to make a change. “I was just hurting myself almost by not being me,” he said. “I had to find myself as a dancer again because I felt terrible. I told myself, don’t expect to do it overnight. Just let it happen, and it’s going to happen. I’m still telling myself that every day, hoping that eventually it will be great. Putting myself out there. I realized nobody wanted me to fail except myself.”

At the time, Mr. Huxley started articulating his feelings by writing in a journal — which he still does, two or three times a week. And it has relieved his stress. “When I’m feeling all of those old thoughts coming back,” he said, “I just try to get them out.”

His turning point as a soloist came from having roles created for him. After working with Justin Peck on “Belles-Lettres” and Liam Scarlett on “Acheron,” he realized: “This is mine, and I can do whatever I want with it. I should just be myself, and then I can bring that to other things. That was empowerment.”

In 2015, Mr. Huxley was promoted to principal dancer after a sparkling debut as Oberon in Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Again, Ms. Miller was making a debut, too, this time as Titania. “It was funny — I remember Peter came up to me and said, ‘Congratulations, that was a great show,’ and it was kind of like: ‘Oh, by the way I’m going to promote you. But where’s Miriam?’”

Mr. Huxley laughed. “It was her first big thing, and he was so excited that Miriam had done well. I was just like, ‘O.K. That feels right.’ I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. I wouldn’t have wanted a spectacle. Maybe he knew that.”